EICR

St Paul's Catholic School, London

St Paul’s Catholic School needed its EICR renewed. They had the old certificates and documentation from the previous test, and they contacted Prolec expecting a straightforward job.

Before mobilising, we reviewed the existing documentation in detail – mapping every listed board and circuit into a clean reference pack for the engineers on site. That preparation revealed the first sign that the job was not what it appeared to be.

The Challenge

When our engineers arrived on site, the previous documentation didn’t match the building. Some boards listed weren’t where they were supposed to be, and it quickly became obvious that the circuit count looked significantly out.

The original scope was approximately 350 circuits. We identified an additional 246 circuits that had never appeared in any previous fixed wire test. The actual scope was nearly double what had been quoted.

The school had a fixed deadline: all work needed to be completed within the holiday window to avoid disruption during term time. Completing only the quoted circuits would have left untested distribution boards in the building – boards that, if found by an insurer or auditor, would represent a clear electrical compliance gap.

Our Approach

We informed the school immediately and extended the team’s presence on site through the full holiday. A parallel survey team physically located every distribution board across the building, ignoring records that had already proved unreliable.

Where the previous contractor had worked from a board list given to them, we treated the discrepancy as a problem to be solved.

The school asked the obvious question: what stops this happening again at the next inspection?

Our answer was to produce detailed floor plans of the entire building with every distribution board plotted to location. Any future contractor or maintenance team can now find every board without relying on records that may be years out of date.

All on-site data went through our Qualifying Supervisor process back in the office: readings checked circuit by circuit, photographic evidence compared against submitted data, cable sizes verified against devices.

The Documentation

The completed EICR covered every board across the site: all readings, all observations, full circuit-by-circuit detail. That document, alongside the floor plans, is now the school’s permanent electrical compliance record.

Alongside the EICR, the school received an electronic set of updated circuit schedules for every distribution board. The existing schedules were in some cases decades out of date, including trip switches labelled for rooms they no longer served. Updated schedules mean the school’s maintenance team can isolate a circuit with confidence, not by trial and error.

The school also received a comprehensive coded observation list. Where the previous contractor’s EICR recorded 30 observations, our report recorded 466. Every issue found during the school electrical inspection was listed, with the recommended fix, and the relevant classification. Code 2 and Further Investigation items are mandatory remedials required to bring the report to satisfactory. Code 3 items are improvements.

The list was presented in layman’s terms with our recommendation on which Code 3 items were worth addressing and why. The school was then able to make informed decisions based on budget and priority.

Prolec didn’t just do what we asked. They found what we didn’t know was there, explained it clearly, and made sure we were properly covered. The level of detail in the EICR – and the floor plans they produced on top of that – is well beyond anything we’d had before.

Ben Collins

School Business Manager, St Paul’s Catholic School

The Outcome

St Paul’s completed the programme with a full EICR covering all 596 circuits. We completed the mandatory EICR remedial works, updated circuit schedules at every distribution board. A satisfactory EICR certificate was issued.

All engineers deployed on site were DBS checked. We scheduled the work to fit around the school day, a safeguarding requirement confirmed at the outset, and built into the programme from the start.

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